Sameera Reddy, who is currently expecting her second child with husband Akshai Varde, revealed that she “fell apart as a person” after her first pregnancy. The actress gave birth to her son, Hans, in 2015.

“I got pregnant in just a couple of months after my marriage. The game plan was to have the pregnancy and bounce back and getting in the limelight again. But I have never experienced anything like that… It was just the opposite,” she said, explaining, “It was the worst case scenario of what I could’ve imagined in terms of my body and the way I fell apart as a person because the pregnancy was very tough for me.”

During her first pregnancy, Sameera was bedridden for four to five months because of placenta previa (a condition that can occur during pregnancy, where the placenta lies very low in the uterus, and ends up covering a part or all of the cervix).

“I just started putting on weight and falling into some kind of place in my head because it went from shows, award functions and a glamorous lifestyle to just not being able to handle what pregnancy was doing to me,” she said.

Sameera disappeared from the limelight and became a recluse. “There is so much pressure upon us as actors or people in the public eye to portray we have this unreal life. I was also buying into it and trying to provide to it as an actor. I was also trying to keep up with that and say, ‘Hey! look at I am so perfect’. (But) I was the poster girl of what a pregnancy shouldn’t be,” she said.

After Sameera delivered her son, she gained weight and at one point, touched 102 kg. “From being that ‘sexy Sam’, I went to this. I put on 32 kg and couldn’t recognise myself. I was a complete mess,” she revealed, adding, “I would leave the house and they said, ‘Is this Sameera Reddy? What happened to her?’ That pushed me into a further hole.”

Sameera plunged into depression but managed to bring herself out of the dark phase by seeking therapy. “I worked very hard. I got help in terms of therapy and understood that I was lost and confused as a person… What I was as an actor and where I am today as a mother and a wife,” she said.

Now, Sameera has made peace with the fact that she will put on “a bit of weight”. “I will not look glamorous all the time. But I wanted to come out and say Hey! it’s okay to be like this’,” she said.

On the work front, Sameera was last seen on the big screen in the Kannada film Varadhanayaka, which hit the theatres in 2013.